Easy Money

by Jacqueline Freimor

About the Author: Jacqueline Freimor's is published in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Murderous Intent, and the e-zine Blue Murder, among others, as well as at akashic.com. Most recently, her stories can be found in the anthologies When a Stranger Comes to Town (edited by Michael Koryta) and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2021 (edited by Lee Child).

Excerpt

Easy money, that’s what it was. All Gus had to do, the fat cop said, was stand in a lineup with five other guys. Shouldn’t take more than ten, fifteen minutes, the fat cop said. Ten, fifteen minutes, and Gus would walk out of the stationhouse with twenty bucks in his pocket.

Twenty bucks was a lot of money—much more than Gus could make standing here on the corner of Sixth and Twenty-third, shaking his coffee cup full of change. Twenty bucks would buy him some Thunderbird. And a burger maybe. Still—

“What’s the problem, pal?” The fat cop laughed. “You worried about the witness saying it was you who did it? Because the sketch looks like you?”

Gus nodded. He didn’t like jail. Sometimes they put you in there even when what happened wasn’t your fault. He’d been in jail before, the last time for taking bananas from a bodega on Fourteenth Street. Or maybe the bodega was on Tenth Street, he didn’t know. Sometimes he didn’t remember stuff. But he remembered the store owner, all right, an angry, angry Korean man. Shaking his fist and yelling. Maybe Gus shouldn’t have taken the bananas without paying, but he’d only done it because he was so hungry. The Korean man didn’t have to yell at him like that. Or get him sent to jail, either, where you were locked up and couldn’t get your Thunderbird. Jail was terrible, even if it was only for a couple of days. No more jail.

“Don’t worry, pal,” the fat cop said. “We already got the guy. We’re just looking for some bodies for the lineup. So whaddya say?”

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